Well I just looked at my games rated 10 and the Sim Military was on the NES. Couldn’t reproduce on Playstation (with sequal, only got 7.5), RPG Fantasy I tested, scores over 9 pretty much all the time regardless of console. Casual Dance varies a lot, I did it on the Gameboy (lol? Dance game on gameboy…) Anyhow, some combos are hard to reproduce, there seems to be too much randomness and or not enough feedback and statistics about it.

I made a Sci-Fi Action game for the Gameling, targeted at Young Audiences, and got a 9.75 total. That franchise became one of three major franchises of my company, and not only skyrocketed my out of the garage, but gave me about 7M to jumpstart Stage 2.

The next big hit was a Steampunk Adventure/RPG for the PC, at Mature Audiences. From that point on the company basically specialized in RPG games. This franchise churned out about 5 games over the years, each getting at least 8’s.

Finally, a publisher deal struck the final franchise which worked… Werewolf/Action/Adventure

I’ll try some of these later as well. In my second run I managed to make two big hit games, one being casual another being a vampire RPG aimed at mature audiences. What I want to know is, based on the RL stuff in the above post…

How can I make… visual novels aimed at mature audiences? I’m only in the small office at the moment and haven’t really specialized in anything yet. I hope visual novels are an option.

Hate to break it to you but visual novels never come up per se. You get plenty of topics that would suit a visual novel - romance, mystery, detective etc - but the closest I could think to actually making one is to focus on the genre being adventure. Great adventure settings are all about dialogue, story, world design at the expense of level design and AI. That sounds a lot like a vis novel to me. Any of the three mentioned above all work well when marketed to mature audiences (I even got a round of 9s from a Romance Adventure aimed at adults on PC late in Stage 2). Hope this helps!